Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Thirty-six

USCGC Terra Nova

The ice fled away below the helicopter – and however much they covered, there was always more. Hard to believe in global warming when you saw a sight like that, though Franklin had served on enough Arctic deployments that he wasn’t fooled. Every year, a little less ice. A lot less, some years. If it kept up, the Terra Nova would be the last Coast Guard ship of her kind.

Out the window, a speck of colour broke the infinite whiteness. A drop in the ocean – but his eye picked it out. As the helicopter flew nearer, it separated in two, like an amoeba. A bright red Scott tent, pitched in the shadow of a huge ice ridge, and in front of it a black snowmobile.

‘Hell of a place to go camping,’ said Santiago.

The ice hardly stirred as the helicopter touched down. Concrete solid. Franklin remembered a class at the academy, some guy in World War Two who’d calculated how thick ice needed to be to hold a given weight. At two inches, it would hold a man; ten inches, a truck. What he was standing on now was probably a good couple of feet. Still.

The tent door opened and an ensign came out, waddling over the ice in his bulky mustang suit. They must all look like a group of old-school comic-book astronauts, Franklin thought. All they needed were the fishbowl helmets.

‘Nothing’s changed, sir.’

As they passed the snowmobiles, Franklin noticed someone had rubbed a hole in the frost that covered the gauges.

‘Out of gas,’ the ensign explained.

‘Of all the luck,’ said Santiago. ‘There’s a Mobil two miles up the road.’

They reached the tent and hesitated, unsure who should go first.

‘Take a look,’ the ensign said.

The first thing that hit Franklin when he crawled in was the colour. Soft, opium red after the whiteness outside. A survival bag lay on a mat on the floor, surrounded by candy-bar wrappers. Two heads stuck out, a man and a woman spooning side by side fully clothed, straining the close-fitting bag almost to breaking. A strand of blonde hair escaped from under the woman’s hat; the man wore a beard that couldn’t be much more than a week old.

‘Are they …?’

The ensign had stuck his head through the door behind him. ‘Hanging in there. Passed out. I thought it was better to let them rest.’ A sheepish look. ‘In case, you know, they weren’t happy to see us.’

Franklin fished out the battered sheet of paper and studied it. The photographs had never been great. Now, emailed, printed, handled and frozen, they looked more like masterpieces of impressionism. Even so.

‘That’s got to be Greta Nystrom.’

He looked at the man next to her. ‘But there’s no way that’s Fridtjof Torell.’

He unzipped the sleeping bag. The man still wore his coat underneath, the white Zodiac Station insignia half covered by his arm. Above it, a name stitched into the Gore-Tex, dim in the tent’s red gloom. Anderson.

A little dizzy, Franklin pulled apart the Velcro fastenings that held the coat together. No zip – it had broken. He opened the coat and reached inside to feel a pulse. Weak, but not gone yet.

As he pulled out his arm, he felt something hard on the inside of the coat. A notebook bulging out of the inside pocket. Two notebooks, in fact, a green one and a brown one, and an envelope sandwiched between them that dropped on to the tent floor when he pulled them out. Still sealed, addressed in the loopy writing kids use when they’re trying hard.

He ducked out of the tent and showed it to Santiago. ‘You believe this?’

Santiago read the address. ‘Is that what this is about? Santa Claus?’

Franklin ripped a hole in the envelope, then paused, embarrassed. Santiago smirked at him.

‘Worried the real Santa’s gonna know you did a bad thing?’

Franklin slit it open with his finger and unfolded the letter inside. He read it quickly.

‘Kid wants an Xbox game and a new bike. Must be British – he says “thank you” at the end.’

‘Show it to Eastman?’ Santiago suggested. ‘Could be a Russian code.’

‘You’re a cynical bastard, Ops. No presents for you.’

‘So my mom always told me.’

Putting the letter aside, Franklin gave Santiago the green notebook and took the brown one for himself. They flicked through.

‘Get anything, Ops?’

‘If I remember the eighth grade right, sir, I’d say this looks like science. Maybe we can have the geeks check that out.’ Santiago looked at his captain. ‘You OK, boss?’

Franklin was staring at the brown notebook as if he’d been hit with a two-by-four.

‘A ham sandwich,’ he murmured to himself.

‘Come again, sir?’

He pulled his hood back, as if he needed more space around him. ‘This one’s some kind of journal.’

Phrases swam off the page.

Laid over in Tromsø – had a ham sandwich at the airport.

Quam calls me ‘the new intruder’.

Why did Hagger bring me here?

If he reads this, he’ll kill me.

‘Did he write his name and phone number in the front?’

Franklin went back to the very beginning and read the first line.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of the north.

Thirty-seven

Anderson’s Journal – Wednesday

It’s not often you wake up to find you’ve been unconscious for two days. And survived a plane crash. And that someone wants to kill you.

I lay on the bed, staring at the grey ceiling, as pieces of memory fell into place. Each one was a minor revelation. I had no framework, no preconceptions at all. Just curiosity, like a tourist flipping through the guidebook of an unfamiliar city.

Heathrow Airport.

Zodiac Station.

Martin Hagger.

A crevasse.

The last piece I remembered was myself. Like looking up from the guidebook and finding the city all around you: suddenly, abstract facts meant something. I shuddered; I think I must have cried out loud in terror. It’s a frightening thing, remembering who you are.

I touched my neck and felt hair, stubble grown just long enough to lose its abrasive edge. I touched my head and felt a bandage.

I heard a door click open, and twisted my head round to see. Which was a mistake: someone had left a red-hot coal in my skull that rocked around when I moved.

Through the tears, I saw a man walk in, wearing a grey polo neck and corduroy trousers.

Dr Kennedy, my mental guidebook informed me.

‘How are we this morning?’ He certainly talked like a doctor.

‘Where am I?’

‘Wednesday morning. And still at Zodiac.’

Zodiac. Lying on the ground, ice crystals cold against the back of my neck. Awash with pain. A figure standing over me. A rock raised to strike.

I rubbed the back of my head. Gingerly. ‘I don’t know …’

‘Some short-term memory loss is quite normal,’ he said. As if that was reassuring. ‘It’ll come back in time.’

Another piece of the jigsaw dropped into place – and another surge of panic. How could I have forgotten—

‘I need to talk to Luke.’ I struggled up, fighting the pain in my head. The clock on the wall said ten past ten. ‘He’ll be at school.’

‘Greta’s spoken to him,’ Kennedy said. ‘He knows you’re OK.’

Greta. Another piece, though I couldn’t fit it into the main picture straight away. I lay back while he fiddled around putting some pills in a cup. I took them gratefully with a glass of water. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was.

I caught him watching me. The panic tightened my chest. In that situation, you’re so vulnerable: anyone could tell you anything.

‘Do you remember the fall?’ he asked.

All my memories felt fake, like slide pictures in one of those old plastic View-Master things, clicking round as you squeeze the button. Click. Standing on the ice, reading a notebook. Click. An explosion in my skull; sinking to my knees. Click. A man standing over me, so big he blotted out the sun. Arm raised. Click. Leaning forward, face buried in his hood, watching me. A start as if he recognised me.

Click. White light.

‘I didn’t fall,’ I said. Experimentally, testing a hypothesis, but saying the words felt right. ‘Someone came at me.’

He tried to tell me there hadn’t been anyone else there except Annabel.

‘She’d gone behind the rocks.’ I need a wee. ‘Someone hit me from behind.’

‘You fell in a moulin,’ he told me. But there was a long pause before he said it. He didn’t look well. His face was grey; his hands were twitching.

‘Someone hit me,’ I repeated. Saying it again to affirm the memory. The View-Master slides had upgraded to video, strictly VHS, like the old tapes you find at the back of a cupboard. Skipping and jerking; bars of static raining down the screen.

Kennedy checked my pupils and tried to tell me it was all a dream. His face came so close, his beard rubbed my cheek as he peered into my eye. Shining the light through me, as if I was the View-Master and he could see the pictures inside. I could smell mouthwash on his breath.

‘I found a notebook,’ I remembered.

An unhappy look crossed Kennedy’s face. As if there were things he didn’t want me to remember. The panic inside me went up a notch. I wished I hadn’t swallowed those pills quite so readily.

He went over to the side and opened a cabinet. I couldn’t see him much – I didn’t want to move my head again – but I had the sense he’d deliberately turned his back on me. There seemed to be a lot of fumbling going on inside the cabinet.

I heard it snap shut. Kennedy reappeared and handed me a green notebook. The moment I touched it, I remembered a bright cave, light so blue I wanted to drink it. A backpack inside.

On the inside cover, I read a handwritten sentence, all capitalised. SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL BEGIN IN FIRE, SOME SAY IN ICE.

Robert Frost, my guidebook said. Strange, the things you remember.

I flipped through slowly. Pulling each page into focus hurt my head; trying to understand it was worse. As much as I knew anything for sure, it looked like a standard lab notebook. Lists of samples with places and dates, hand-drawn graphs and equations. And, not far in, a line that almost made me fall off the bed.

‘“Fridge wants to kill me,”’ I read aloud.

‘A figure of speech.’ Kennedy smacked his hand to his mouth and swallowed something. ‘Martin did some work for DAR-X. Fridge thought that was sleeping with the enemy. Fridge is a bit of an eco-warrior,’ he explained, in case I’d forgotten. Which I had.

‘And what’s “X”?’ I asked. I saw it on every page: Concentration of X, dispersal of X, flow of X. The punctuation – sharp exclamation points, heavy question marks – emphasised his frustration.

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ Kennedy glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘If you’re feeling up to it, see if you can make anything of the notebook while I have a look at Trond. Good to give your brain something to work on,’ he added as he went out.

‘Who’s Trond?’ I asked. But he’d already gone.

Greta came in. A second later, I realised I’d known her name without thinking about it. That felt like progress.

‘You woke up.’

‘I’m starting to wish I hadn’t.’

‘What do you remember?’

‘I don’t know how much there is to forget.’

‘Do you remember the plane crash?’

‘Very funny.’

‘It’s not a joke.’ Briefly – she doesn’t have any other way of talking – she told me how they’d loaded me on to the Twin Otter to fly me home, how it had turned around with mechanical problems, and how it had crash-landed. ‘You were lucky you survived.’

‘Jesus.’ I lay down on the bed. Sweat soaked my cheeks.

‘Kennedy said you spoke to Luke. To tell him what happened.’

‘Somebody had to.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘He said he was staying with his aunt.’

She said it the way she said everything: every word a nail to be hammered in straight. But I heard the question. Or maybe I imagined it, from hearing it so often before.

‘His mother’s dead. In a plane crash, not long after he was born. That’s why, when you told me about the plane …’ I pulled up the sheet and wiped sweat off my face. ‘Both parents – what kind of desperate coincidence would that be?’ I forced myself to calm down. ‘Anyway, I’m alive.’

‘It sucks about your wife.’

Interesting reaction. ‘Most people say they’re sorry.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She was teasing me, I think, but not unkindly.

‘We’d already split up.’ Three years from falling in love to divorce, via marriage, a baby, an affair and a scandal. And her PhD. We packed a lot in, in those days. We were young.

I looked at Greta for some sort of signal to go on. She was staring into space, face fixed in an expression of furious concentration.

With a shock, I remembered another piece of the puzzle. Her and Hagger. There was I, wallowing in pity for something that had happened seven years ago; her wounds were still wide open. She didn’t want to hear about me.

Greta and Hagger. An image flashed through my mind: glass snapping, blood on my fingers. Greta had been there, I knew now. She’d said—

‘Hagger’s death wasn’t an accident.’

She gave me a cool once-over. ‘What do you think?’

‘How about the plane crash?’

‘They said it was the fuel tank.’

‘And?’

‘I filled the tank. It was fine.’

‘You think someone was trying to cut us off? So no one could leave?’

‘Or they didn’t want you to make it.’

It was just as well I was lying down. Blood pounded in my skull, each spurt a jolt of pain. Strong enough to rupture the thin bone where I’d banged my head and spray all over the medical room’s clean white walls.

‘Someone at Zodiac?’

It was a silly question, and Greta’s expression let me know it.

‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’ I ransacked my memories, pulling them out frantically like clothes from a cupboard and leaving them scattered over the floor. Nothing fitted. I looked at Greta. ‘What have I forgotten?’

‘What did you know?’

Not nearly enough. ‘Was my bag on the plane?’

‘It’s in your room.’

I leaned up, wincing. ‘Could you do me a favour? There should be a brown hardback notebook inside. Can you bring it?’

She came back two minutes later. As she handed me the notebook, an envelope tucked inside it fell out. It slid off the bed before I could grab it.

‘I’ll get that,’ I said. But Greta had already bent down to pick it up. She read the address on the envelope and gave me a funny look.

‘Aren’t you too old to believe in Santa?’

I shrugged. ‘A man’s got to believe in something.’

I took the letter off her. Father Christmas, The North Pole, the address said.

‘Luke gave it to me. I think he expects me to hand-deliver it.’

‘We’re five hundred miles from the pole.’

I pulled a face. ‘Next you’ll be saying Father Christmas doesn’t exist.’

‘Of course he does. But the elves drowned because of global warming.’

‘Who’s going to make the presents?’

Greta flicked back one of her braids. ‘That’s what happens when you fuck the planet. No presents.’

Abruptly, she checked her watch and headed for the door. No apology, no goodbye. That’s Greta.

‘Where do I start?’ I asked.

She didn’t stop, but she said something as she walked out. It sounded like, ‘Trust no one.’

Thirty-eight

Anderson’s Journal – Wednesday

Kennedy came back.

‘I’ve got to go up to Vitangelsk with Eastman,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’ He got two pill containers out of a cabinet and put them on the side. ‘Paracetamol. Take two every four hours to keep the pain away. And this one’s diazepam. Memory loss, coming out of a coma, it can all be a bit stressful. If you feel panicky, diazepam will calm you down a treat. And don’t overexert yourself,’ he added.

‘Next time, I’m going private,’ I said. But he was out too quick to hear.

I picked up the pill jar and put it right against my eye. The plastic showed me a fisheyed, amber world. A dangerously distorted place.

The panic and the pain were almost unbearable. I twisted off the cap and looked down the barrel of the jar. Four white pills, lonely at the bottom. Obviously I wasn’t the only one at Zodiac feeling stressed out.

Why would anyone want to kill me?

I hurled the jar away from me. It rolled across the benchtop, spilling a couple of the pills. Kennedy hadn’t said anything about staying in bed. I got up, clenching my teeth against the pain, and went to my room to get dressed. One of the things I’d been happy to forget is how depressing that room is. I didn’t stay longer than I had to. I went to the mess to get a cup of tea.

Mid-morning, Zodiac’s a quiet place – like a resort hotel on the day the guests change over. I could hear Danny in the kitchen washing up, a stereo playing somewhere. Everyone else was in the field. I settled into a chair by the window with my journal and Hagger’s lab book.

Someone said, I can’t remember who, that everyone who keeps a journal secretly hopes someone else will read it. Like a murderer wanting the police to catch him – however much you pretend you’re writing for you alone, your most intimate thoughts, you can’t let go the hope that one day, someone will care and know who you were.

I never thought of my journal that way. I started it when Luke was small, because I was terrified at how much I was already forgetting. If I did think someone else might read it one day, I never imagined that the someone would be me. But there I was, reading through what I’d written, like a technician reloading data on to a computer that’s crashed. It felt strange. Even things I’d written just a couple of days ago didn’t feel like me any more. We put so much faith in words, but they’re flimsy, inadequate things. Even what I’m writing right now, if I read it back next week, it won’t seem the same.

But this morning, it was enough to jog a few memories. By the time I’d reread it, the only thing missing was an explanation.

Why did Hagger bring me here? I wrote that on Sunday. And, the question I hadn’t written, but which might as well have been at the top of every page: Why did he die?

I put down my journal, grabbed myself another cup of tea and opened Hagger’s notebook. Maybe that would have some answers.

I saw the quote on the inside cover again.

Some Say The World Began In Fire, Some Say In Ice.

I was pretty sure the quote was wrong. In the Robert Frost poem, the world’s supposed to end in fire (or ice). His colleagues would say it was typical of Hagger’s ego to rewrite a great poet, but I got the joke.

It’s never easy reading someone else’s lab book: it’s much more private than a diary. After all, there’s always a chance someone someday might be interested in the diary. Hagger’s lab book was mostly an assortment of graphs and tables, like a PowerPoint presentation with the interesting bits cut out. No context, just lists of numbers that looked like sample labels to me, and probably like a phone directory to anyone else.

But even the numbers couldn’t completely stifle Hagger’s personality. He hung around in the margins and the blank spaces, shouting from the sidelines even after he was dead.

Where is it coming from?

Why Why Why? (Double underlined.)

Maybe Anderson?

And, a couple of pages in, the line I’d read in the sickbay. Fridge will kill me.

‘Feeling better?’

You could have predicted who it would be. Fridge, still dressed in his ECW trousers. Not holding a fire axe or pointing a gun at me, just giving me his friendly Viking smile.

I remembered (or did I?) the man standing over me on the glacier. Fist raised to strike. Could it have been Fridge? He seemed familiar, but all my memories felt like half-truths that morning.

I snapped the notebook shut. Then I decided to go on the attack.

‘There’s something I’m trying to understand.’ I opened the notebook again and spun it around so he could see.

The smile vanished. I looked him in the eye, trying to squeeze out the truth. Maybe I’m not much of an interrogator.

‘I wish he hadn’t written that.’

‘It’s awkward,’ I agreed.

‘Kennedy already asked me about this. I shared some confidential results with Hagger; he got Quam on my ass saying I couldn’t publish.’

I spun the notebook back so it faced me. Above the smoking-gun sentence was a table labelled Me Concentrations, Echo Bay.

‘Methane,’ I guessed. ‘Something to do with the DAR-X drill site?’

Fridge didn’t contradict me.

‘Methane gets produced by the breakdown of oil in water.’

He gave me a grudging nod of respect. ‘Can do. Or, hypothetically, if you’re pretending to pump oil, but actually drilling for methane clathrates in the seabed.’

‘Hypothetically?’

‘Hypothetically unless you want to be sued for violating commercial secrecy.’

‘Was Hagger’s work commercially secret?’

Fridge shook his head wearily. ‘He didn’t even care about the methane. He just found it out by accident.’

‘What was he looking for?’

‘Bugs,’ said Fridge. ‘Bugs in the water. Something corroding DAR-X’s pipes. Hagger found a bug in the water munching them.’

‘What sort of bugs?’

He shrugged. ‘You should talk to K-Mart.’

I looked out the windows, confused. ‘Where’s K-Mart?’

‘The guy you replaced, Hagger’s old assistant. Kevin Maart, so we called him K-Mart. He must have helped Hagger.’

The room was filling up with students drifting in for lunch. I could smell lasagne, and I was ravenous.

Fridge gave an odd laugh. ‘But maybe K-Mart didn’t know anything. If he had, Hagger wouldn’t have brought you.’

* * *

I ate quickly and messily. It’s hard to linger over a meal when you’re staring round the room wondering if someone could really want to kill you. Hard to keep the soup on your spoon if your hand won’t stop trembling.

Afterwards, I stopped off in Quam’s office and asked him if he knew how I could contact Kevin Maart.

‘I can’t tell you that.’ Every time he speaks, he makes you feel you’ve done something wrong. ‘Data protection.’

I told him I just wanted to check out a couple of things that Hagger had been working on. That seemed to upset him even more. He set his perpetual-motion toy going, staring at it as if he could glimpse something profound in the spaces between the swinging balls.

‘You’re supposed to rest. If it weren’t for these …’ click ‘… regrettable …’ clack ‘… circumstances, you wouldn’t even be here.’

‘I thought I might make myself useful.’

‘Don’t. Just …’ click ‘… keep out of trouble.’

There were a lot of things I’d have liked to ask him. Like: Who killed Hagger? Or, given how fidgety Hagger’s research made him: What happened to his notebooks? But I didn’t think bringing any of that up would count as keeping out of trouble.

‘Did you ever set me up a login account on the network?’ I asked.

His eyes narrowed, as if I’d asked for his PIN. ‘Didn’t get round to it.’ He was trying to sound casual, though that was a stretch. ‘Now you’re leaving, you don’t need it.’

‘I’ll be around for a few days yet.’

He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘How’s your head?’

‘Better, thanks,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘But about the login account …’ I relaxed into the chair with an appreciative sigh. The sound of a man who might be there some time. Quam took the hint. He got a piece of paper from his desk and slid it across to me.

‘Fill this in and get it back to me.’

* * *

Quam’s martinet routine annoyed me – especially as data protection’s a rather anachronistic concept these days, given what governments get up to. I went to the radio room, logged in to the guest computer and googled Kevin Maart. I found his home page at Cambridge, his publications record. Rather more impressive than mine, to be honest: if we ever run into each other, I’d be embarrassed to say I took his job. It also gave a phone number, and an email address: [email protected].

He wouldn’t be checking that any time soon. Obviously he hadn’t updated it yet. I wrote an email anyway, just in case. It amused me to think of it travelling halfway around the world, and pinging into the room next door.

I took one of the Iridium phones from the charging shelf and rang the number on the website. Quam would hit the roof, no doubt, at the cost of it.

A receptionist answered. ‘Kevin Maart’s away in the field,’ she told me.

‘He flew home a week ago.’

‘He hasn’t been back in the office.’

Strike two. I asked if she had a mobile number for him. Perhaps she did, but of course, she couldn’t give that out. Data protection.

I took the notebook back to Hagger’s lab to see if I could make more sense of it in context. I looked in the fridge and found the samples he’d left there: forty-three of them, clear plastic bags filled with water, each numbered and dated with a white sticky label. Also, I noticed, each one had a round dot coloured in on the label, either red or green.

I turned through the notebook until I found a list of samples whose reference numbers matched the bags. Beside each one, he’d written down where he’d taken it. Helbreen. Helbreensfjord. Echo Bay. Nansen Bay. Luciafjord. Konigsfjord.

Some of those places I knew; most of them I didn’t. I went to the bookshelves in the mess and rummaged through the thrillers and potboilers until I found a survey map of Utgard. I spread it out on Hagger’s lab table. It had been made in the sixties, but I didn’t suppose Utgard had changed much. I worked my way over it, marking the location of each of Hagger’s samples with pencil X’s. It reminded me of being home with Luke, drawing treasure maps together.

As soon as I’d finished, it was easy to see where Hagger had been. A row of X’s ran down the west side of the island, with a cluster in Echo Bay and another up at the Helbreensfjord, where the glacier met the sea. More sporadic samples made a dotted line along the coast, north to the tip of the island, and as far south as Zodiac, where they grouped in another cluster. A single spur branched off up the Helbreen glacier, regularly spaced X’s until they reached more or less the place where Hagger had died, with a couple more on the other side of the mountain, near a place labelled Mine 8.

I found green and red marker pens in one of Hagger’s drawers. Cross-referencing the samples and the notebook, I circled my X’s on the map red or green, whichever colour Hagger had marked the bags. I also wrote in the dates. Then I stood back and examined my work.

The red circles made a bone shape, with clusters at Echo Bay and at Helbreensfjord, and a thinner stretch along the stretch of coast connecting them. North of the line, and south down to Zodiac, they turned green.

He’d been sampling for something in the ice, or the seawater beneath. From the numbers in the lab book, it looked as though red meant positive and green meant negative. Transferred to the map, that meant that the substance appeared in the water either at Echo Bay or at the Helbreen, flowed along the coast, then vanished.

It might have been flowing in from the glacier’s run-off. But all the circles on the Helbreen were green. Could it be something the oil company was emitting from Echo Bay?

I studied the dates next to the circles. He’d started last October near Zodiac, taking samples along the shore and out in the fjord. All green. November, December, January: he hadn’t gone far, but he’d stuck at it, picking up a couple of samples every week. What drove him? He didn’t have to be here. Why suffer months of darkness and freezing temperatures when he could have been at home in Cambridge sipping port in the SCR? Tracing my finger over the samples, I could almost feel his frustration as January slipped into February and everything stayed green. The samples became less frequent.

Then, in the middle of March, he suddenly turned up in Echo Bay. Nine samples that week alone, all ringed bright red. Nothing the next week; then the samples started marching north along the coast until they reached the tip of the island, where they went green again.

Whatever was in the water, he’d tracked it from Echo Bay to the Helbreen. Overshot, then circled back the next week to take a dozen more samples at the mouth of the glacier. All red. The week after, he carried on up the Helbreen, almost to its head on the big ice dome. Green again. The week before I arrived, said the dates. The week before he died.

‘And what did he find in the water?’ I asked the map.

My head was hurting. I went to the medical room and took two of Kennedy’s paracetamol. Then I stared at the map some more. Inevitably, I found myself focusing on Echo Bay.

The notebook didn’t give any clues to what Hagger had found in the water. The ubiquitous X, but he never named it. After my chat with Fridge, methane was an obvious candidate. But I’d read all the way through the lab book: apart from Echo Bay, he’d never tested any of the other samples for methane. And if that was it, he’d have labelled it for what it was.

I had the samples; I could always test them myself. But there are a million ways to test a water sample. Spectral analysis, gas chromatography, chemical analysis, DNA tests … You have to have some idea what you’re looking for. Otherwise, it’s needle-and-haystack territory.

But I did have one idea. Hagger found some bug in the water munching on DAR-X’s pipes, Fridge had said. And bugs aren’t that hard to find. Not if you have an electron microscope sitting on the bench.

I took some water from the Echo Bay sample and strained it through a polycarbonate filter, then stained the residue with fluorescamine dye. The fact that Hagger had all the equipment to hand gave me confidence. Then I popped the sample under the microscope.

A mass of blurry chaos appeared when I put my eye to the microscope, like snow on a television set. I turned the knob and it came into focus. That hardly changed the picture. That single drop was full of life: scores, if not hundreds of tiny organisms, twitching and swarming. Even under magnification, they didn’t look much clearer than grains of rice.

Back home, I could have extracted DNA to find out what they were. Here, I didn’t have that option. From the notebook, it looked as though Hagger had – he must have sent it back to the UK – but the tests hadn’t been conclusive. In his notes, he referred to the organisms as Gelidibacter incognita.

A quick lit search confirmed that Gelidibacter is a genus of bacteria that grows in ice and cold water; the incognita, I presumed, was for this unknown species. Why Hagger should have been so excited about it, I can’t guess. Even if it’s never been described before, it’s not exactly a new flavour of Coke he discovered. Dip a bucket in your local pond and you’ll probably find an uncategorised bacterium if you look hard enough.

I spent a couple of hours working with the microscope, checking each sample. Simple, repetitive work: exactly what I’d come here to escape from. Back home, I’d be checking the clock, looking forward to getting out to collect Luke from school. Now, I was happy to lose myself in it. It distracted me from the thought that someone might want to kill me.